A Kansas Court of Appeals ruling last week on the legality of a Johnson County sales tax for schools may not be the last word on the issue, but it certainly inserts an interesting element into the state’s current debate about public school funding.

In November 2002, Johnson County voters approved a quarter-cent sales tax to beef up funding for its public schools. Counties are allowed to levy local taxes for economic development, they argued, and maintaining strong public schools is a key element of being able to attract new businesses to the county.

A sales tax works like a charm for Johnson County. County residents pay the tax, of course, but so do all the out-of-county people who come to Johnson County to shop. It’s a sobering thought for Douglas County residents to consider that the sales tax revenue they leave in Johnson County every time they purchase something there is supporting someone else’s schools. It allows Johnson County to provide more for their students and pay higher salaries for teachers, even luring many away from Douglas County.

Douglas County may feel some of this pain, but the sting is even worse in Wyandotte County, Johnson County’s neighbor in the Kansas City metropolitan area. Johnson County has a larger tax base and more retail business than Wyandotte County, and whenever Wyandotte County residents cross over and spend money in Johnson County they are fueling an ever-increasing funding disparity between schools in the two counties.

The Johnson County tax, Wyandotte County argued in court, flies in the face of the state constitution, which requires all Kansas students to have access to equal education opportunities. Johnson County District Court and the Kansas Court of Appeals turned down Wyandotte County’s request to block the distribution sales tax funds but stopped short of deciding whether the sales tax was unfair to Wyandotte County students. The final word on that issue, the appeals court said, will come from the Kansas Supreme Court case set for hearing on Aug. 30 about the legality of the state’s school funding formula.

People in Douglas County are sympathetic to Johnson County. Many local residents also would be willing to pay more taxes to provide additional funding for public schools. It seems only fair to allow communities to do something extra for their own schools if they want to.

The Johnson County example, however, reveals a hole in this logic. By levying a sales tax, the county actually would build its schools using money that comes not only from its own residents but also from anyone else who comes there to shop. Allowing local sales tax revenue to benefit schools would widen the funding gap between rural and urban school districts. Unless the state does something to equalize that funding, rural districts and their students would be big losers. Local property taxes might provide a more fair funding supplement, but there still would be inequities, and many Kansans are loath to add to the property tax burden.

Perhaps local taxpayers who want to do more for their public schools should be allowed to do so, but the fairness issue becomes less clear when a sales tax is used to essentially rob Peter to pay Paul. It’s just one of the complicated school funding issues the state and its Supreme Court will have to sort out.